Saturday, September 27, 2008

Venezuela: A UFO Destroyed by Lightning?

On September 17 of this year, Jairo Esparragoza managed to capture the flight of an alleged unidentified object that appeared to vanish after being struck by a bolt of lightning.

The event was recorded between 6 and 7 p.m. using the camera of a Motorola Motoraz V3 cellphone as the witness drove along the Guarenas-Guatire Expressway in the vicinity of the Buenaventura Shopping Mall in the state of Miranda in north-central Venezuela.

“The human capacity for astonishment is unending,” was the initial statement that opened Jairo Esparragoza’s story. He explained that he began recorded the lightning bolts in the sky out of sheer curiosity, following a torrential downpour that drenched the Venezuelan capital and its environs for several hours. He became aware of the strange presence only a few minutes later.

“It rained heavily and there was considerable lightning. This drew my attention, and as I was stuck in traffic, I began recording what was going on. But after a while, I was able to see one or two orbs suspended in the sky through the telephone camera.”

Startled by what he was seeing through the screen of his cell phone, Jairo Esparragoza stopped focusing the device skyward to concentrate it directly on the strange phenomenon, but was unable to see anything. However, upon resuming focus, the object became visible once again on the mobile phone’s screen. “I wasn’t able to see it with the naked eye, but when I trained the camera on it once more, there it was, suspended and motionless. I checked to see if it was a light post and it wasn’t. It wasn’t the camera either,” he explained.

The situation remained thus for several seconds, and Jairo Esparragoza, seemingly the only witness to this unusual scene as it played out in the rush-hour tumult common to that time schedule between Caracas and Miranda, still couldn’t believe what his cell phone camera was picking up.

Suddenly, a lightning bold struck close to the UFO, causing its apparent and final disappearance.

“Even though there was only a little bit of power left in the cellphone, I kept recording and after a few seconds, a lightning bolt struck and the object vanished immediately from the sky,” he stated.

The still images drawn from the video show how this lightning bolt quickly chances color when it approaches the UFO, changing from bluish white to pale violet.

An analysis was performed on the stills taken from Jairo Esparragoza’s video shows that there was no trickery involved and that it possibly shows a technological device of unknown aspect and behavior, discarding the possibility of airplanes, helicopter or other known aircraft.

In the opinion of Jorge Luis Figueiras, a specialist in digital content for the Fundacion Argentina de Ovnilogia (FAO) presided by Luis Burgos, “there’s not much that can be done with these photos, since their resolution is too low (0.025 megapixels).” He added, however, that after increasing the resolution level on the image, he was able to see two apparent objects that remain visible in several frames, where they can be seen as “luminous and having a spherical shape."

About Me

The Institute of Hispanic Ufology was established in October of 1998 with the appearance of the first issue of Inexplicata. The organization currently has representatives and contributing editors in over a dozen Spanish-speaking countries. Director: Scott Corrales.